Claudia Goldin, dog historian

On Monday I went to interview Claudia Goldin, the wide-ranging economic historian who is best known for her work on the underpinnings of the gender gap in wages for men and women. What we started with was a lesson on the history of golden retrievers and Labrador retrievers, two very different dogs with similar names. That lesson was delivered spontaneously, as I was walking with Goldin to her office at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Unbeknownst to me, Goldin shows golden retrievers, and has a friendly and insistent fellow at her office. I knew going into this interview that Goldin was a sponge for information and we would cover a lot of ground. I did not expect a lesson in the development of divergent strains of dogs from the St. John’s Water Dog.